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UAE keen on Iran trade

A senior UAE official has said that the United Arab Emirates is eager to protect its trade with Iran, adding that his country's trade ties with Iran are legitimate, Press TV reported.

UAE's minister of state for foreign affairs, Anwar Gargash, said the trade connections between Iran and UAE comply with the UN Security Council's sanctions imposed on Tehran and such measures must not hurt legitimate commerce.

"I think it is extremely important to have that balance right, between our international commitments on the one hand and also between the fact that a lot of the transactions that we do have are legitimate," he was quoted as saying in Gulf News on Tuesday.

Iran is a significant trade partner for the UAE, with trade volume between Iran and the emirate of Dubai alone estimated at about $10 billion a year.

Also Yousef al-Otaiba, the UAE's ambassador to the United States, made a similar remark in The National newspaper.

"We do a significant amount of trade with Iran. It cannot be all illicit and it can't be all illegal," Otaiba said.

"What we're trying to do is sift the good from the bad, and make sure nothing legitimate gets harmed by sanctions," he said.

But despite this, UAE has enforced the UN sanctions "very openly", said the envoy who was speaking at a conference in the UAE capital Abu Dhabi.

The remarks came less than a month after the UAE central bank froze 41 bank accounts targeted by the new sanctions on Iran.

The UAE business and aviation transport hub of Dubai also closed down the offices of 40 firms suspected of breaching the sanctions against Iran.

The head of Iran-UAE Chamber of Commerce, Masoud Daneshmand, however, said that the accounts do not belong to businessmen trading in the UAE market, and they may belong to some organizations whose names are listed in the Security Council resolution.

The reports followed a tour by the undersecretary of the US Department of the Treasury to some Middle Eastern countries to discuss Iran's nuclear program.

Stuart Levey is on a tour of the UAE, Bahrain and Lebanon this week in an attempt to persuade the countries' officials into limiting their trade relations with Tehran.

Levey says Washington is also planning to send envoys to Brazil, Turkey, South Korea, Japan, and Ecuador to discuss how to minimize their economic ties with Iran.